Publications

State agencies tasked with governing poverty often aim to improve individuals’ social conditions by transforming their conduct. From welfare offices to prison reentry programs, those agencies work to compel behavioral changes by making the receipt of aid—or punishment—contingent on individuals’ compliance with requirements like appearances for regular appointments and negative drug test results. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a court-mandated therapeutic program, this study shows how “compliance” with standard behavioral requirements is constructed around health, financial resources, and institutional trust, with the result that the most vulnerable people are systematically marked as noncompliant and channeled toward more punitive interventions. This sorting process helps to legitimize the inequalities it produces: by framing marginalized people as unwilling to accept help to improve themselves and their lives, agencies can justify placing them under more coercive forms of control.

This book examines the causes and consequences of reforms that offer mental health treatment as an alternative to traditional punishment around the United States. The expansion of these reforms is widely celebrated as a step toward reducing the punishment of the ill. But this book shows that its impacts have been misunderstood. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in criminal courtrooms and court-mandated treatment settings, in-depth interviews, and experimental survey data, the book demonstrates that placing mental healthcare under control of the courts is paradoxically expanding the reach of the criminal legal system and amplifying inequalities. 

Police collusion with drug market organizations is widespread around the world, but the nature of this collaboration remains poorly understood. This article draws on a unique data source to dissect the inner workings of police collusion: transcripts of wiretapped conversations, embedded in thousands of pages of court cases in which state agents have been prosecuted for collaborating with drug market groups. We catalogue and analyze the wide range of social interactions that constitute police collaboration with drug market groups and show that those interactions are often embedded in trust networks constituted by residential, professional, friendship, and kinship ties. Our findings signal the importance of reciprocal social ties surrounding police corruption and cast light on what we refer to as the clandestine hands of the state.

Poor urban neighborhoods throughout the Americas are marked by high rates of interpersonal violence, much of which is associated with the underground drug trade. Scholars have examined the social dynamics that produce and shape violence among neighborhood residents and the state agents who police them. But less is known about the clandestine collaborations between residents and agents of the state and how those collaborations might contribute to violence. This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork and an original legal archive to analyze the links between police collusion with drug market groups and interpersonal violence. We find that 1) police provide their collaborators with powerful weapons and ammunition; 2) state agents become involved and help escalate violent territorial disputes between underground market groups; and 3) violence erupts between state agents colluding with civilian dealers and those attempting to disrupt the drug trade. These findings shed new light on the social and organizational factors shaping patterns of violence in poor neighborhoods, illuminating the ways that state agents contribute to that violence. In doing so, the findings advance our understanding of policing, drug markets, and the role of the state in shaping the everyday lives of the urban poor.

“Broken windows” theory—or the idea that visible disorder encourages violent or disruptive behavior—has profoundly shaped approaches to social control in the United States. Researchers have documented substantial and racially disparate increases in arrests under broken windows policing, but less is known about the impacts of the theory in other institutional domains. Drawing on an original dataset of 7726 schools, this study examines patterns of punishment and racial inequality under the influential “no excuses” model of schooling, which applies broken windows theory to discipline in an effort to reduce inequality. Results indicate that the no-excuses model is applied primarily in schools with high Black student enrollment and is associated with substantially higher rates of student suspensions. Black-White disparities in suspension are also roughly twice as great within no-excuses schools as within others. These findings shed new light on a popular approach to education reform and suggest that, in the context of pervasive anti-Black social structures and cognitive biases, efforts to control perceived human disorder may tend to intensify punitive interventions into the lives of Black individuals across institutional settings. Findings have implications for scholarship on schooling, social control and inequality, and the re-entrenchment of racialized state punishment in the context of reform.

This chapter describes residents’ views of and experiences with daily violence in Arquitecto Tucci by examining how perceptions of their neighborhood have changed over time. We then outline a set of pathways through which drug-related violence travels inside the homes of the neighborhood’s poor residents, illustrating the limits of focusing exclusively on the public expression of drug-related violence. The analysis we offer here is important not only on its own merits, but also because it provides crucial contextual information to understand the intricate relationship between collusion and violence that will be the subject of scrutiny later in the book. In this chapter and the next, we will show why residents believed they lived in a “no man’s land”—una tierra de nadie. This expression has three closely interrelated meanings. “No man’s land” refers to a place in which the state does not address locals’ pressing needs. It also denotes the place’s violent character—an area where “anything goes.” ...Lastly, this shared understanding of a “no man’s land” points to the core theme of this book: collusion between drug traffickers and law enforcement agents. 

This article offers a relational account of the emergence, development, and impact of a social movement against urban fracking in Denton, Texas. It highlights the role played by the interactions between grassroots activism, local officials, and other stakeholders in the political construction of shared understandings of environmental risk. Drawing upon scholarship on risk perceptions and on social movement outcomes, the article argues that as a result of relationships of conflict and cooperation between activists, officials, residents, and oil and gas industry representatives, a field of opinion about the potential (negative) impacts of fracking emerged. It shows that grassroots, face-to-face, joint action played a key role in the campaign to ban fracking. Localized collective action should be at the front and center of social scientific examinations of shared understandings of environmental danger.

Este artículo ofrece un relato relacional del surgimiento, desarrollo, e impacto de un movimiento social en contra del fracking urbano en Denton, Texas. Destacamos el rol que juegan las interacciones entre los activistas de base, los funcionarios locales, y otros interlocutores en la construcción política de un entendimiento común del riesgo ambiental. Basándonos en la literatura sobre percepciones de riesgo y los efectos de los movimientos sociales, argumentamos que como resultado de las relaciones de conflicto y cooperación entre activistas, funcionarios, residentes, y representantes de la industria petrolera, emergió un espectro de opiniones sobre los impactos posiblemente negativos del fracking. En particular, mostramos que la acción de base comunitaria fue fundamental para que la campaña lograra prohibir el fracking. La acción colectiva a nivel local debe tener un papel protagónico en las investigaciones científicas del entendimiento comunitario del peligro ambiental.

A wide range of sociological work documents higher rates of violence within households in neighborhoods where violence related to illicit drug markets is prevalent. Existing explanations for this association point to cultural scripts, to an absence of community social control, or to the effects of individual exposure to violence on the propensity to reproduce it. Drawing on in-depth interviews and field observations, we argue that much violence within the home may instead be understood as an extension of the systemic violence of the drug trade. That violence travels into homes by way of three often coexisting sequential pathways: 1) invasion, in which dealers enter homes in search of other drug market participants and families are caught in the middle; 2) protection, in which family members seek to protect themselves and each other from repeated theft of household items; and 3) preemption, in which parents use violence against their children in an effort to prevent more serious violence against them by other drug industry participants. This analysis sheds new light on the impacts of the current governance of drug markets and on the difficult choices faced by families in highly vulnerable contexts, contributing to a theorization of violence as situated not in individuals or groups but in patterned sequences of events.